The Beatles or Elvis Presley. Debergs prog rock thread started me thinking and I thought it was a fairly easy choice until I talked to a few others about it and looked up some numbers. Now it seems like a toss up... although I know what my original gut feeling was.

The Beatles...
Best selling band in history... roughly 1 billion 600 million units sold
22 #1 singles world wide
7 grammys
10 films

The Beatles absolutely changed the direction of music, and are responsible for the crap noise that has been generated for the last 40 years.

I don't dislike the Beatles, but I despise the direction that music took as a result of their influence.

I would list that under "inspire" not influence. I know I am kinda defining my own terms here but I don't see much of what they did as anything particularly new or special.. just popular. the Beach Boys on the other hand actually create new sounds... so did Phil Spector for that matter.

I agree with you that they influenced music in the way you are defining it... for sure. I am just trying to take the conversation more into the realm of actual changes to how the music is structured or played. I guess I should change the term to INNOVATE.. I don't see either as big innovators but the bands I listed were.

I certainly hope you don't view 'younger' people who say that the Beatles are the 'greatest' [leaving aside the issue of what influence means] as universally, or even preponderantly, unaware of other bands of history. I STILL know 10x more about the late 60s, early 70s, than I do the past 10 years. I've been fervently musically engaged from about 83 on.

The way I see it, to divide up younger generations of music-listeners there are 2 main groups. Those who are well-versed and well-listened in the rich history of what I will call "modern music" (beginning roughly in the mid 50's) and those who simply pick out a big name i.e. the Beatles and say they're the greatest ever.

The former category is increasingly diminishing as high school and college aged kids ignore the influences in favor of "popular music" of today. That is not to say there is not a large audience who still appreciate "classic rock." Almost without exception, those who are musicians themselves pay homage to their influences and acknowledge them as invaluable. For example, I was watching an old rerun of Bonaroo (or some other music festival) on the Paladia network on DirecTV in which they showed the end of a Katy Perry concert. Imagine my surprise when the outro came along, the band played none other than the intro to Rush's Cygnus X-1, definitely one of their more obscure early pieces. I would almost guarantee no one in the audience knew that the piece the band was playing was anything more than some random riff.

But overall, if those who appreciate music and have listened to many different bands and come to the conclusion that, in their opinion, the Beatles are "the greatest of all time," I have no problem with that. It's when they haven't listened to anything but saw the movie "Across the Universe" and made that decision that irks me. (I ran into someone a while back who thought those were all original pieces from the movie, and when showed the originals, opined that the remakes were all superior)

Its only through discussion and the exchange of ideas, such as here, where we can begin to educate younger audiences on where their modern music comes from.

To expand on my post.. i would put guys like Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz and Duke Ellington above both. If we limit it to pop/rock then Buddy Holly jumps far ahead of both... so does Duane Eddy or Booker T. And of course the Beach Boys.

I'm a big fan of both the Beatles and Elvis but neither did a huge amount to push the envelope. It can be argued that the Beatles did as they matured but again, not nearly as much as so many others.

I'll disagree about The Beatles there. Their early stuff was literally just pop fodder but their later stuff... Sgt. Peppers, I Am The Walrus etc was pretty ground breaking.

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Elvis Pressley did not write any of his songs. The Beatles wrote almost all of their songs. Elvis music career went on hold while he was in the army and again when he went into movies. While he did have music from those movies, he wasn't recording in the studio. I really don't think he had a big influence on popular music after returning to the stage in 1969.

The Beatles were so popular they had to stop touring. Their songs entered more into the consciousness. They wrote songs with more meaning. Elvis tried to get into that late in his career but I think with little success.

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I would list that under "inspire" not influence. I know I am kinda defining my own terms here but I don't see much of what they did as anything particularly new or special.. just popular. the Beach Boys on the other hand actually create new sounds... so did Phil Spector for that matter.

I agree with you that they influenced music in the way you are defining it... for sure. I am just trying to take the conversation more into the realm of actual changes to how the music is structured or played. I guess I should change the term to INNOVATE.. I don't see either as big innovators but the bands I listed were.

It was their innovation that changed the direction of music.

A song like "She's Leaving Home" was groundbreaking and introduced the idea that musical instruments just making noise is music.